WILL OUR SENSE OF STYLE AGE BETTER THAN THESE EXAMPLES?

Do You Remember These 10 Long-Gone Home-Decor Nightmares?

Image: FOTEROS

Judging the past in hindsight might be a bit unfair but, sometimes, it can be fun. If you’ve ever guessed the age of a photograph or a movie by the furniture and decor showcased in it, then you might know what we are talking about.

Each decade has its own fads and passing styles of home decor. And while some of these aesthetic statements might seem tasteful even today, many documented instances did not age so well. The following list offers some of these unfortunate examples for your perusal and, let’s be honest, amusement.

Image: Tincho Franco

Having your walls feel as soft and warm as your thick floor carpet might seem like a good idea for about a second. But any person with a minimum sense of practicality will understand the issues that would come with such a decision.

In the 1970s, however, carpet was just about everywhere. When people ran out of floor space to carpet, they started putting it on the walls. The aim was to create a comforting, homey feel, but as people everywhere discovered, it was a nightmare to clean. It was disastrous to vacuum as the wool fibers would get stuck inside the cleaners.

Image: Blake Woolwine

Sleeping on water, lulled by the rolling waves beneath you, in your own bedroom, was a thing. Never mind the fact that water beds weighed over a thousand pounds on average, and filling them up included bringing in a hose from the backyard. Or the nightmare that ensued if they spring a leak. For some reason, people liked them.

Fortunately, these days, sleeping atop a rubber sack filled with H20 has gone the way of pet rocks, platform shoes, and TV antennas.

Image: Michael Pepper

Carpeting everything seems to be the '60s motto. And yes, this included bathrooms. Toilet lids, seats, those mini rugs that hugged the base of the toilet, you name it, it was all covered in spectacularly unhygienic, germ-catching rugs.

Yes, it can be comfy and not as cold as tile or linoleum on bare feet. But that is not enough reason to transform your bathroom into a sanitary trap, a hub for mold, mildew, and toxic spores.

Image: Thought Catalog

Bathroom sinks, toilets, bidets, and bathtubs are usually bought and installed together in a home. And, for some obscure aesthetic reason, back in the ’70s, avocado was a very popular color choice for these elements.

Maybe it had something to do with Art Nouveau and the whole "back to nature" thing of the early 20th century? We don’t really know. But luckily, this also has gone the way of the Dodo.

Image: Denis Agato

Dripping walls and rugged ceilings, as if you were living in a grotto, were wildly popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And the complicated process of removing such ghastly features has made them survive to these days in many places.

To be fair, these types of ceilings were said to offer better acoustics and sound absorption, but dust and dirt cling to the rough and uneven surface, making it a nightmare to clean.

Image: Tim Mossholder

Curtain-matching window valances were all the rage back in the day. Heavy drapery and darker ambiances were very much appreciated until the ‘90s but not so much today, when light is paramount.

The ‘70s and ‘80s family sitcoms that revolved around a central living room or kitchen where most of the events took place were swarmed with these types of fabric. Lucky for us, not anymore.

Image: Jonas Schöne

Glass bricks were once a ubiquitous feature in not just banks and modern dentist waiting rooms but, for some reason, also in family homes. The excuse was allowing light in without losing privacy but, really?

Whether in the form of windows or shower screens, these glass blocks were used as room separators in the 1980s and '90s. Since then, we've found more efficient ways to keep spaces light.

Image: Toni Cuenca

Having inflatable furniture in your home is akin to using patio furniture in your living room. But worse, since patio furniture will not explode if met with a needle. If you remember those neon inflatable chairs and sofas teenagers loved in the ‘90s, you know what we are talking about.

The noise, the heat, the color, the smell, the shape. Just about everything about this seemingly practical solution to home decor was truly horrible.

Image: Afrimod Studio

Wicker furniture was a popular choice among people who thought it would be great to live every day as if in a holiday resort. It was a staple of groovy 1970s interior design, usually accompanied by beaded curtains, wall-to-wall carpeting, and plenty of macrame.

Downsides? It breaks easily, it creates debris as it loses its fibers, it makes a screechy noise, and, let's face it, it looks like something out of a Stephen King novel.

Image: @felipepelaquim

Never mind the nightmare of looking for round sheets. There is a reason why beds are square, and it has to do with the human body shape. Whoever invented round beds must have slept alone for his or her entire existence since having to share one of these contraptions with somebody else is nothing short of, again, a nightmare.

Lucky for us, round beds are long gone, at least in most of the civilized world.

The wonders of human language

You might be surprised by these linguistic facts

If languages and grammar are not your thing, linguistics might seem complex and boring, but nothing could be further from the truth. While some areas of linguistics require prior knowledge, many linguistic concepts and ideas relate to everyday life and can be understood by anyone. Here are some simple linguistic facts that might surprise you!

People like to list languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, or Hungarian as "the most difficult languages in the world", but this is not true. Think about the ease with which babies pick up a language, becoming fluent at a similar rate, no matter the place. The difficulty of a language lies not in its structure, but in its similarities or differences with your own language. Mandarin might be extremely difficult for an English speaker, but quite manageable for someone who speaks Cantonese. So, there isn’t a "most difficult language", but a "most difficult language for you".

This might come as a shock, but you already know everything about your native language. Native speakers learn by imitation, not through methodical study, so they don’t rationalise their language; they simply speak. They might later approach the language from an academic perspective and put a name to different structures and concepts, but they will not learn anything that is actually new.

This might seem obvious, but most people don’t think about it. While differences in grammar and structures are evident, it is common for language learners to approach vocabulary as a set of labels: If I’m learning Spanish, I take an apple and label it "manzana". But languages are not labels, but a way of seeing the world, such as cultures near the North Pole having dozens of words for snow or languages in hierarchical societies changing according to the people speaking. While at a basic level we can often find one-to-one translations, the more we learn about a new language, the more we adopt a new worldview.

Does your family have certain words or phrases that mean something unique to you? It might be a funny mispronunciation that stuck, or a phrase that you use in a specific circumstance, sometimes passed down for a few generations. This is called a "familect", and it happens in most families, but also in tight-knit friend groups. The repetition and preservation of this private code reinforces familial bonds and identity, functions as an emotional anchor, and provides a sense of belonging.

Each language carries a worldview, so it is not surprising that our personality changes slightly when we change languages. We don’t become someone different, but we adapt to the cultural norms and values attached to that language. People who speak more than one language also tend to link specific interests, knowledge, and memories to each language, and specialists have noted that not only do our tone and volume change with each new language, but that we are most likely to swear or discuss sensitive or taboo subjects in a second or third language, as they provide an emotional distance impossible to avoid in our native tongue.

English is a fairly flexible language, meaning that many of its components can be placed in a different order without the sentence becoming unnatural or impossible to understand. But this flexibility does not apply to adjectives, at least when we have to use many of them in a row. English speakers naturally place adjectives in a specific sequence: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose. While this is done subconsciously, changing this order results in unnatural-sounding phrases, such as "a red new nice car".

Have you ever wondered why people refer to sign language as ASL or "American Sign Language"? Not only are there multiple sign languages, classified in families in the same way spoken languages are, but each one is a language of its own, with unique grammar, rules, and vocabulary. This way, American Sign Language (belonging to the French Sign Language family alongside its Russian, Brazilian, or Italian counterparts) is not a signed version of American English, but a distinct, unique language with more than half a million native speakers.

Languages change and shift with use and time, which causes some words to gain positive meanings, but also others to become negative. This downgrading of a word’s meaning is called "pejoration" and is connected to many factors, one of them being whether the term is considered masculine or feminine. English is not a gendered language, but it has gender-specific pairs, such as "master/mistress", "fox/vixen", "bachelor/spinster", or "governor/governess". While initially mistress, vixen, spinster, and governess were merely counterparts to the male-specific term, over time they developed a negative connotation, while the masculine term remained positive or neutral.

Babies typically start using meaningful words around the 12-month mark, so it is natural to think that, before that, babies "don’t speak". While they don’t use meaningful spoken language, they communicate from birth with cries, sounds, and gestures, and these communications have an accent. How is this possible? Third-trimester babies in utero have fully functional hearing and recognize sound patterns, pitch, and intonation. Once they are born, their cries, and later their babbles, mimic the intonation, pitch, and rhythmic patterns of the language of their environment.

What sound does a sheep make? Well, a sheep from where? English-speaking sheep go "baa", but Korean-speaking sheep go "me-e". While sheep don’t care about linguistic differences, humans adapt animal sounds to the available sounds and phonetic rules of their language. This happens not only with animals, but with all kinds of sounds, such as machines, strikes and collisions, physical and natural phenomena, human sounds, and more.